WeAnimate 2025-01-17 | wam#0056

The Nordic countries are blessed with several fascinating regional animation festivals, each with a distinct creative vision and a unique role in the local industry and community. They also happen to be clustered closely together in time, making the Northern European festival season a busy one. However, the task of operating an animation festival is difficult and sometimes even lonely. Small festivals have limited resources, and the pandemic highlighted certain challenges that these festivals face.

As a result, years of discussion among northern animation festival founders and administrators has resulted in a new entity: the Northern Animation Network (NAN). NAN was recently awarded a generous grant of €300,000 by the EU’s Creative Europe Program to move forward with an ambitious plan for collaboration and growth. The founding festivals of this new network—Viborg Animation Festival (Denmark), Fredrikstad Animation Festival (Norway), BLON Animation and Games Festival (Lithuania), and REX Animation Festival (Sweden)—are now busily planning their agendas to make the most of this opportunity.

Because the partnership is so new, many members of the relevant animation communities were unaware of its existence. Sandra Brunkow Simonsen of Viborg Animation Festival (VAF) was invited to present the project at Fredrikstad Animation Festival (FAF), as part of the festival’s professional programming. The events were organized by Anders Narverud Moen, Festival Director of FAF, who says:

While a lot of Norwegian culture tends to look inward, at Fredrikstad, it has always been important to have a view out of Norway. Norway alone is not big enough for the project or the product, so we have to broaden our horizons. We are small countries with smaller audiences, therefore it’s important for these smaller scenes of different cultures to be able to reach bigger audiences with artistic animation. Nordic animation producers have really seen the value of collaboration over the past ten years or so.

 

There is  a lot of work happening across borders in the Nordics, and many of these collaborations started in Fredrikstad. It’s what naturally happens when you are the oldest Nordic animation festival: Fredrikstad is traditionally where people have met and started talking and working together.

 

Sandra presented this new festival network at an event at FAF, along with presenters from the animation research network and the animation producer network. People think “that’s a lot of networks”, but they don’t all know about each other. I put together a panel conversation with a representative from each network so that people could learn more about these collaborations. The feedback I got afterward was that the panel was too short: people want more information about NAN and the other networks, and more discussion about tools for collaboration and how to work together.

– Anders Narverud Moen

NAN is Streamlining Festival Administration

One goal of the network is for the festivals to collaborate more closely and make administrative processes more efficient, in order to reduce the administrative burden of managing a festival. NAN hopes to create a shared platform to manage or streamline film submissions, accreditations, and other administrative tasks. Not only will this shared platform make festival administration more efficient, but it might benefit other members of the animation community as well. For example, the shared platform may result in more film submissions, as filmmakers find it easier to submit to multiple festivals at once, or in more accredited visitors, as applicants can be approved for multiple festivals at the same time. Moen says:

Because all of us are small administrations, our resources are quite limited and our ability to pay people is quite limited. So we wanted to collaborate with each other on basic administrative elements. The exchange of know-how and experience between us makes us all better at what we do. That’s the foundation of the collaboration.

 

At Fredrikstad, for example, we have a lot of potential, but also need more resources to solve different problems. NAN helped us to think through how we could collaborate in development of new festival features, and how to actually execute the festival more efficiently.

– Anders Narverud Moen

Simonsen agrees, pointing out:

It’s actually amazing when you ask yourself “What would be good for us?” and you realize that it would also be good for other festival partners, good for artists, and good for the festival community as well.

 

One very important aspect of our festivals working together is that we are not competing for audiences. Each festival has their own region, their own personality, and their own audience. This enables us to support each other more fully. Luckily we have a good environment for Nordic collaboration; there are lots of foundations and associations and collaboration, so we’re very aware of this special relationship in the north, politically and culturally and historically.

– Sandra Brunkow Simonsen

NAN is Building an Online Animation Experience

The second key goal of NAN is to create an online platform for animation and related content. This platform should support online and remote festival activities, of the kind which were necessary during the pandemic, but so difficult for small festivals to execute well. It should also provide a persistent destination for animation lovers all year long, creating audiences and generating excitement outside of the festival season. Simonsen says:

In recent years, there has been increasing demand for festivals to be present online and have a digital platform. It’s a massive job: it’s basically having an entire second online festival at the same time as the physical one. Fredrikstad is perhaps the one that has been most successful so far with streaming and online content.

The idea is that a NAN platform could also host content all year long, becoming a place where we can curate and promote the festivals and the content. That way we aren’t each doing one online thing for one week individually, but we can combine our efforts and do it all year.

– Sandra Brunkow Simonsen

Anders Narverud Moen reflects on the origins of the concept with:

The collaboration in NAN evolved slowly, because we needed to find a common ground. During those meetings and conversations, we thought a lot about the post-pandemic situation, where everything was digital and then suddenly everything was physical again. The digital platform each festival was working on kind of collapsed, but we now have an opportunity to rethink and re-envision how a digital platform and digital dissemination should work. It’s boring to just have seminars on Zoom, and people are sick of that anyway – it reminds them of a time that they don’t want to go back to. So we have done research on how we might develop a platform as a collaboration, rather than each festival creating their own digital platform – it could be a broader, Northern Europe event. It’s joining forces to handle a bigger task.

 

If you create this digital platform, it can also help you grow your physical audience. The digital platform is part of a broader audience development project. We can use the platform to promote other festivals in the network, educating audiences about each others’ work.

– Anders Narverud Moen

Simonsen says:

We’ve been very inspired by the Louisiana Art Museum channel. They do digital interviews with modern artists who are relevant to the museum, and we thought to do something like that, talking to studios, filmmakers, artists in the industry, including films, games, art… during festivals we have access to amazing artists, guests, and jury members, so we should take advantage of that opportunity to create content.

 

It’s important for us to not just show films, but to show games, art, XR, and let people have a sense of how broad animation really is and how far the format can reach. We could also expand our focus to not just look at the work of one person, like a director, but look at a whole studio, where the approach and the way of working becomes interesting. For example, Cartoon Saloon is just as interesting as Tomm Moore is as a director, and the same is true of many game studios. Over time, our content library could expand to showcase all of these different aspects of animation.

– Sandra Brunkow Simonsen

Next Steps for NAN

The EU grant period is from 2025-2026. This both limits the scope of what NAN can achieve, and creates opportunities for work to begin right away. The founding festivals are already working hard on defining their two-year plan and immediate next steps. Moen says:

We got this grant because we all stepped up and reached out and figured out a good project and purpose. We are using the money to solve shared problems, which is how it ought to be.

 

We know each other, but we need to get to know each other better – that’s crucial to the success of our collaboration. We have to know we are on the same page and share the same goals. That’s the most challenging thing about international collaboration – there are different cultures and backgrounds and mindsets. Even though we are all Nordic and all part of the same animation scene, we have different ways of working, and everyone has a different agenda. The better we know each other, the better we can find common ground and work together productively. We can also snap up each other’s good ideas and implement them within our own organizations. It’s a lot of work – it’s fun work, but it’s a lot of work.

– Anders Narverud Moen

Regarding immediate next steps for NAN, Simonsen says:

We need to figure out how to actually do and implement these ideas. How do we keep our own individual ways of curating and programming, while sharing a common platform? For example, VAF has an international program, but FAF and Lithuania are mainly regional festivals with only a few international shorts. VAF has a submission fee, while the others don’t. It’s definitely doable, but it’s a matter of finding the way that fits everyone’s individual needs and perspectives. But these challenges are minor compared to what we can get out of this collaboration.

 

We all have valuable information to share with each other, even if we don’t have a big name or a lot of credentials. We all have things we know and can support each other with. We still need more people – there are more people who need to be part of this project and have relevant expertise and skills to share with us, and areas we want to recruit new partners – either festivals or film institutes or other ways to represent the animation industry in the north. The knowledge-sharing is incredibly important.

 

The level of openness and sharing in the animation community makes this kind of network possible. We all have the same challenges and we are so eager to work together. The only area where we are tempted to compete with each other is in the area of premieres – for us in Viborg it’s not that important, but for other festivals it’s a higher priority. But for everything else, in terms of distribution, in terms of how we measure and report guests, in terms of how we assess success, we have so much to learn from each other and so many ways that we can support each other. And these things will actually be better for the whole industry – this is true for all of Europe, but especially true for us here in the North, where we are especially agile, and are working directly with decision-makers,  and have a lot of value to offer to each other.

– Sandra Brunkow Simonsen

The Northern Animation Network is yet another example of how collaboration in the Nordics helps to create new opportunities for growth and exploration. This ambitious network will solve problems common to animation artists, guests, and festival administrators throughout the region, and has already started putting a plan in place. We congratulate NAN on receiving the EU funding, and look forward to seeing the fruits of this remarkable collaboration in the coming years.

Organizers

Viborg Animation Festival
Sandra Brunkow Simonsen

BLON Animation and Games Festival
Laura Almantaite

Fredrikstad Animation Festival
Anders Narverud Moen

REX Animation Film Festival
Petrit Gora

Credits